Ep 7. Cause and Effects The Delusional Podcast with Kevin Blake Ferguson

Any conjurer worth her cards knows that the hardest thing to fool an audience into believing is not that something happened, but rather that nothing happened at all. During the course of any illusion, the secret actions that make a trick trick must be either hidden completely, or masked as something else. Doing this in a convincing way is the grand challenge of the prestidigitator. We must obfuscate the cause in order for there to be an effect.
In the realm of magic (and it is a realm, let there be no mistake), an 'effect' is the name for what the audience experiences. It can also be the name for a plot (e.g. "I love card-to-wallet effects") or the name of a trick itself (e.g "Triumph is one of the most beautiful effects"). In books on legerdemain students find tricks described twice: first 'the effect' and then 'the explanation.' Why am I explaining the finer trifles of magical taxonomy? To point out that in the art and experience of magic, there are no causes, only explanations.
This absence of causes with the existence of effects within the art of magic can be a source of inner moral struggle for modern magicians, who are less interested in moonlighting as a real mystic or presenting "mysteries from the Orient." The problem is one of belief and honesty: what do we, as magicians, expect our audiences to believe is the cause for our effects? What do we want them to believe? When we provide no cause, magicians worry that there is an implied one—that the magician is a god-like figure who can snap her fingers and make the impossible possible. To escape this, which feels to many like a drama-less experience of magic, some performers today employ a fake cause, known as a fake process or a 'faux-cess', in order to make their magic more 'believable'. The irony of 'believable magic' is lost on these entertainers, and the deception is double because they do a disservice to their audience, impressing them with something they might actually now believe is real, when it’s not.
I tend to think that these worries are exaggerated, and that 99% of people who see magicians do understand the simple contract that they've signed on entering the theater—that they are here to be deceived, to enjoy seeing things they can't explain, and to try to figure out that absent cause. Because in magic, the cause is actively searched for. For all the unnecessary fears of magicians, people very rarely attribute actual powers to the magician instead of the much more reasonable explanation—that they are watching magic show. But in life, which is arguably more explainable than a magic show, we make this error of attribution all the time.
When we look out at the world, and specifically the people who occupy it, how do we judge the causes for effects we see? Unlike in a magic show, where we assume that effects are caused by the situation of being in a magic show, not the magician having powers, outside the theater we tend to assume that the causes for the behaviors we see in others are dispositional in nature, rather than situational. The textbook example of this tendency, known as the fundamental attribution error, is of being cut off in traffic—do we assume the other person is a jerk, or do we assume that they are in a hurry that is justified by some reasonable circumstance, such as being late to a meeting or rushing to the hospital? Research and my memories suggest that we tend to think the former.
The assumptions that we form about strangers form the basis for our disposition toward humanity. If we attribute character flaws to what can be explained by situational factors and external incentives, we will be like the magician who believes his illusions are real, and accordingly who will be fooled by the world. However, if we understand that the behavior of others is rooted in the context of their environments and our perceptions of our situations are to some extent illusions, then we will be able to better appreciate the person and the human condi